Stone-First (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

Stone-First went up through the shelving, the way the adults go, which is not the squeeze; the squeeze was closed to Stone-First before the youngest was born. The adults go up the broad broken slope where the deep shelves into the upper levels, slowly, over ground that announces you whether you like it or not, and Stone-First liked it, and moved a stone at the top as well, a proper one, so that anything with ears in the upper levels would know.

The line was where the youngest had said. Three sets of marks in the silt, come through the squeeze and stopped, all together, and turned. The place where the humming stone had stood was still there too: a round print, pressed in, with the silt pushed up round it where the youngest had turned it straight.

Stone-First stood on the line. Not on the up-people's side of it, and not behind it in the dark. On it.

And stayed.

That is all the chapter has to tell, and it is enough, because it is the thing Stone-First does. There is no more to it than there ever was. You go to the place where the deep stops and you are there, on all the times when nothing happens. The light did not come that time. It did not come the next time either, or for many times after. Stone-First went back down to the warm to sleep, and came up again, and stood on the line, and the silt took the shape of Stone-First's feet next to the shape of the up-people's, and the two shapes stayed there together in the light that never changes, which was, Stone-First thought, already a kind of telling, even if nobody had heard it yet.

Below, Carried-It-Sleeping kept the small ones from the squeeze, every telling, with the same no and the same when you fit, and moved stones for them, and felt the warm change shape when they left it, and was beginning, slowly, to understand what it had cost Stone-First to stand at the margin all those tellings while nothing happened, and to let a small one go up past it unannounced, and to wait to be told.

Above, on the line, Stone-First waited to be asked.

It is not the same as waiting to be told. It is harder, because you cannot move a stone for it. But it is the same shape of thing, and the Told are good at that shape. They have been practising it since before the tellings begin.